WMD
by Kuro49
Summary: Sequel to XZ&AO. Herc/Chuck. Raleigh/Yancy/Mako. They may bleed blue but the Hansens know them when they were human once.


This is the third and final installment of the powered!AU, a sequel to AO, and a sequel to a sequel to XZ. (Please read those first or else this will probably make little sense.)

Apparently the plot of PR didn't want to happen. But it isn't like I can mess up the PR timeline more than canon's already done. Aaaaand this series is like 5K too long (there is probably a crazy amount of things I didn't address but I trust that your headcanon will actually be better than anything I can come up with).

XXX

**WMD**

XXX

They land in Hong Kong in the middle of a storm.

And it is one of those storms that is almost just as relentless as the Resistance they've become. Even without the long line of military blood coursing through their veins, orders are orders. This is a world torn into a bloody mess from the bastards that keeps coming through from the bottom of the Pacific.

(This is a world about to end.)

Striker is streaking with water when they bring her in.

And to think the Hansens used to love the ocean too.

.

He's seen the damage and the aftermath.

These boys aren't ghost stories or folklores made up for the civvies that will never see the things he's seen. These are real and they are real. And he has seen the swamps of acidic blue that wrecks just about everything it comes into contact with. Hell, he has felt it in their Jaeger, the Kaiju splattering neon with every launched missile from Striker's chest.

It's a burn that gets beneath the skin, one that takes ages before it really goes away.

And even then, here comes the phantom pain.

The Hansens are every bit human, but Herc has a point of reference. Pain is a thing he is intimately aware of when he looks down for blue, and all he sees, with his own two eyes, is the front of his worn grey Henley without a single stain.

Herc can't imagine what the Beckets have been through in that torn Conn-Pod off the coast of Anchorage.

.

Max sniffs at the air, head lifting from where he has been comfortably weighing over Chuck's feet, his tail thumping something steady over the toe of dad's boots. From his vantage point on the Shatterdome floor, Chuck's scowl only continues to cut deeper when he sees what the rain has dragged in.

It has been a long, long time.

And it only ever gets worse (before it can get better, and maybe not even then) when he sees the Becket brothers walking just behind the Marshal and his little girl.

Chuck hates that his dad feels like he owes them something when he takes Raleigh Becket's hand without a flash of hesitation, strikes up a conversation like they haven't _ran_. And then something else twists even deeper when Herc folds himself into the arms that Yancy Becket throws around him.

It digs like a knife. And it is one that digs in deep.

Chuck doesn't need it spelled out for him, he can see how they are. How unapologetic the Beckets are when they press even closer still like the world can't tell. Chuck clenches fingers into fists, and his words taste of venom that burns in his mouth. But he doesn't take them back.

There is bad blood in the water, that much he can tell. He can smell it just as keenly as he can feel the impending doom. It's nothing new, he knows. Nothing is about to change.

"Mori."

He takes Max's leash from Mako's hands, remembers a world not of this one, and lets it go. (Something he hasn't done in just as long.)

_._

_Hey, mum—mum?_

There are dust and ruins and a palpable sense of terror in the air. He's got freckles up and down his arms. Fresh ink stark against the skin, still red around the edges where the needle has marked and marred. His lips are bitten red but he has a smile like his mother, dimples over cheeks—_I didn't make the wrong choice._

The sharp conviction cuts. The mantra a slow, steady thing that pulses beneath everything else.

_Never did, _he pulls him into his arms. It is of words that don't exist, in a language they don't speak. _Never will, _and he is not dying but there is death in the air._ Sydney going out in another nuclear blast, Mutavore taking out the rest in blue, always that damn shade of blue_. It's that and more. It's potent and it wrecks. A streak across Striker's chest, the acid biting through the armour in a continuous feedback loop of him and him and the metal groaning around them.

_Not when it comes to you_.

Chuck breathes out in staccato.

Herc doesn't let him go.

_Never_.

It's a whisper being made against his skin, and the strum of this slow, steady burn is unmistakable. In the dark of their shared room, he thumbs at his faded tattoos and imagines that martyrdom is not for them.

.

Herc's been to Kodiak Island and the facility there.

He's been there more than once. He doesn't know the extent, but he can imagine. He's always known what people are capable of doing to the unknown. Acidic tears and Kaiju Blue blood, it's the manifestation of their worst nightmares looking just like them.

He's glad the Beckets ran.

.

They watch as Ms. Mori takes them to their girl.

The Hansens imagine they can feel her bleeding heartbeat next to theirs.

.

Herc has never told Chuck, not out loud.

But the boy knows his way around a drift. Manila might not be a lifetime ago, but it certainly feels that way when the Beckets have been gone for five years. And Striker's kill tallies continue to rise.

Herc owes them everything he has now.

.

Raleigh remembers Hercules Hansen from Manila.

(It was back in 2019 when Striker had just been launched, brand new and devastatingly fast, while Gipsy was already something of a battle-worn beauty. The kill went to the Becket brothers, making it their fourth. The Kaiju was called MN-19, and that was that.)

"Becket." They both turn to him like they are twins instead of brothers with enough of an age difference to count. "The two of you did good work out there today."

"It was a pleasure getting to work with Striker and yourself, sir." Yancy speaks for the both of them, and he is about to turn away when Raleigh catches him around the arm, his eyes resting on the tight set of the sergeant's shoulders. While the man isn't the same kind of legend Marshal Pentecost is, he has piloted every generation of Jaeger. It is respect and also understanding when they wait because Raleigh can see that there is more.

Herc looks at both of them, expectant of something that might just be rejection, except the brothers are nothing but open before he starts, "your compatibility, how'd you know?"

Yancy looks over at his brother, smile halfway to a grin. "I waited three years for Rals to turn eighteen so we can join the program together. There's never really been anyone else for either of us."

"I," the man stops, and while he doesn't look uncomfortable, he also looks as though he'd rather be anywhere else. "I've got a son, name's Chuck. He just started at the academy."

"Good for him."

"But he's going to fail his pons training." Herc gives them both a grimace of a smile, "he's incompatible."

"With his partner?"

"With everyone they've tried to pair him up with." He rubs his temple in frustration, at both the instructors' ultimatum (that Chuck might be the best but he is only as good as his co-pilot) and at Chuck, the brat himself.

"…How about you, sir?" Yancy asks with a shrug. "You did pilot every Mark. You're as close to universally compatible as there is."

"That's a terrible idea."

Yancy raises an eyebrow just as Raleigh grins.

"It is, but we all know it'll probably work."

.

It isn't until five years later that Raleigh meets Chuck Hansen. And even then, he meets the man's dog before he actually meets him. And it's a miracle that he doesn't start a fistfight, right there in the middle of the Shatterdome with the Marshal standing beside them. It isn't so much for the distaste in his words but the way he looks at Yance and him with what might've been disgust.

Chuck Hansen has strength and he can throw punches, it's easy to notice the broad shoulders with that height, but Raleigh imagines he doesn't know how to aim.

(Or maybe, Raleigh can just spit a mouthful of blood.)

.

Their first drift is not done out of a warped sense of loyalty.

It's done, only because there is no one else. Chuck learns to navigate his way around a drift but that isn't until later. Right this second though, Chuck isn't capable of hate when he startles into a realization that loss is not a thing that can be measured, or compared.

The RABIT is set running, the ends of his mother's dress trailing behind. And that is both the beginning and the end of a father and his son.

.

Herc doesn't deny it.

He has no need for a whisper of a voice telling him what he already knows, that you don't kiss your son like you do your wife._ But you did, and you still do_. Hercules Hansen hated himself then, and he hates himself now. He wraps a hand around them both, palm slick with sweat and spit and cum from round one. And it is the same kind of military efficiency that Herc manages to kiss away the last hints of coherency from between Chuck's lips before he can let out a half stutter of what might have been _dad_.

(It isn't so much that he does this but that he does this out of love.)

He may not bleed blue, but oh, he is a monster all right.

.

The two of them are fifteen, sitting cross-legged in the Kwoon.

Chuck Hansen doesn't hold anyone's hand. But he takes hers when she blinks her eyes close. Mako Mori can't show him what the other side of the breach looks like from where it feels like a foreign presence in a corner of her head she doesn't want to touch. The room is empty and the clock ticks away another hour as she tells him of a world not at all like this one. The blue trailing along her jaw makes him ache. She shows him what it's like to be the first of what the world comes to call the XZs.

And Chuck listens, he hasn't done that since his mother died.

.

She sits him down.

Pushing a steaming cup of tea towards him, there is a smile in her eyes that makes the sharp lines of her face soften. Once upon a time, Chuck doesn't know how to look at Mako without resentment. Once upon a time, she has never made him listen, that she is more than just the enemy's blood in her veins.

"You've slept with them." He says, and he doesn't need to look at her bed to make sense of it.

"I've been inside their heads, Chuck."

And he understands, he really, really does. He hasn't been drifting with his father for so long without stumbling out of their headspace knowing nothing. But understanding is not the same as acceptance, and Mako knows this just as well. "You're still there now."

"…I'm not far." Chuck makes to grip his cup of tea tighter. She doesn't sigh but it is a close thing. She starts, and anyone else, he would've already swung a fist out to catch at their jaw, "you, and Ranger Hansen have your mother." But no one else is quite like Mako, so Chuck lets her continue, if only to give her the benefit of the doubt. Even if Angela Hansen is a beautiful, guilt ridden memory in his head. "Raleigh and Yancy have Jazmine."

(In a way, they think they had it coming, to die like their little sister in a car the same shade of blue as Gipsy's war paint. The crash like the tear Knifehead's made of their Conn-Pod. But she doesn't tell him that.)

"They ran."

"I would too, if I didn't know better." Since then, she has seen her medical files. She's a lab rat that didn't die in the maze. There is no fine line, there is only a stretch of grey. She would've surely died in that facility if sensei hasn't been there, if Tamsin hasn't dyed defiance into the roots of her hair. She is one of the lucky ones.

"You didn't."

"That's not a sign of weakness, Chuck. I stayed because I know sensei will protect me." She takes his hands from the cup, and waits until he looks at her. "They ran because they didn't have the same guarantee, Yancy couldn't risk Raleigh, they ran because they lo-"

Chuck scowls at the word she wants to use.

"...Wouldn't you do the same for your father?"

Chuck looks away when she tries again.

.

When they fight, they fight like they fuck.

And when they fuck, well, that is really not so different than going to war. They are in the dark of their shared room, and it isn't so much that they hide this from the rest of the world but that they can barely look each other in the eye. It starts with a hand at the belt, an easy pop of the button, a drag of the zipper going down and Chuck has him in his hand, spit-slicked fingers curled around the base of his daddy's cock.

It ends with the bed groaning beneath their combined weight. He doesn't ask for more. (Harder, faster, _please_.) Herc only bites back a sound that is harsh and slight and every bit like them. They don't draw it out and he's not pliant in his hands. He shifts his hips, and it's an angle that works, one that gives him purchase, takes him deeper in, (has him kissing his old man just a little bit sweeter). Like that can even begin to make up for half the things done wrong between them.

They are deliberate when it counts (but it always does, no one goes out in those death machines without knowing that they may never come down from that metal throne.)

.

The Jaeger make a fortress in the launch bay.

But it has only been months since Striker's watched as Gipsy takes down another pilot team. It's like Knifehead all over again. Only this time, no one staggers out of the Conn-Pod, clutching at their hearts and souls still beating as one entity with no breaks in between. Instead, they disappear within the ocean, tangled in their harnesses, and the Jaeger they fish out from beneath the waves is turning her head to the cameras, like there is someone else out there for her.

A drift goes three ways. And Gipsy is no different.

(You don't leave a death machine to die on its own.) Weapons of mass destruction like them, they don't die at all.

Striker Eureka knows that Gipsy Danger hasn't been drift compatible with anyone since the Becket brothers have had their veins doused in blue.

.

It doesn't happen all at once.

The alarm sounds, like they all know it will. It is a sound that is engraved into every Ranger's heart and soul, circuitry lines burned into their skin, one that has them snapping into attention.

"Triple event, ladies and gentlemen." Tendo's voice comes through the comm, and the whole Shatterdome seems to come alive. And it is a second later that the LOCCENT's chief officer breathes out. "Bitch is big."

"Mr. Choi."

The Marshal's voice interrupts the broadcasting. And they can almost hear Tendo rolling his eyes as he corrects himself.

"—Slattern it is."

It doesn't always happen all at once but the end, often times, does. They've got blue on their hands and they aren't about to run. This is still the world saving the world.

(In another life, there are worse odds.)

In another life, Yancy dies and Raleigh runs. In this one, Yancy lives but the Beckets run nonetheless, and it's really not so different. In this life, even if Mako is drift compatible with both of the Becket brothers, she isn't their co-pilot. She has Stacker Pentecost who will climb back into a Jaeger for his little girl and see this war to the very end, and maybe even beyond that.

This is the one where the Hansens are still the same, and not at all when they enter Striker's Conn-Pod for the last time as two.

"Better suit up quick, Rangers."

XXX Kuro


End file.
